Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/271

 tion was past. It was Mary Anne who played backgammon with her father of an evening; it was Mary Anne who bathed her mother's head when it ached; who beguiled the younger children to bed with tales of gnomes and fairies, of good little girls and bad little boys; it was "Miss Mary Anne" to whom the servants came in any domestic emergency. She used sometimes to wish that she had been given a gentler, more musical name, since she was to hear it called in so many keys, by so many voices, to so many ends. She had been named for her mother, who, however, had always been called "Nannie." "And she's always been treated 'Nannie, Mary Anne sometimes said to herself, rejoicing in the gentleness with which everybody approached the delicate, dependent woman. Mary Anne loved her mother with a devotion which was maternal in its tenderness and generosity; and next to her mother she loved her troublesome brother, Tom.

Tom, the "scapegrace" of the family, was four years her junior. He was no less bent upon having his own way than were his brothers and sisters. But where they simply demanded, he wheedled. Now wheedling involves many little expressions of affection, with a pinch of flattery thrown in, and now and then a kiss crops out in the process. When Tom told Mary Anne that she was the best sister a fellow ever had he was merely making a statement of fact, which the